LIBERTARIAN

ENTERPRISE

Most Americans Should be Ashamed to Celebrate the Fourth

Editor's note: The following essay, which was originally published on
July 3, 1997, is excerpted from Vin Suprynowicz's book, "Send in the
Waco Killers."

What an inconvenient holiday the Fourth of July has become.

So long as we stick to grilling hot dogs and hamburgers, hauling the
kids to the lake or the mountains, and winding up the day watching the
fireworks as the Boston Pops plays the "1812" -- written by a subject
of the czar to celebrate the defeat of our vital ally the French -- we
can usually manage to convince ourselves we still cling to the same
values that made July 4, 1776, a date that continues to ring in
history.

Great Britain taxed the colonists at far lower rates than Americans
tolerate today -- and never dreamed of granting government agents the
power to search our private bank records to locate "unreported
income," nor to haul away our children to some mandatory,
government-run propaganda camp, swamping their immune systems with
dozens of mandatory vaccinations and doping up the more spirited young
lads on Luvox or Ritalin against our will.

Nor did the king's ministers ever attempt to stack our juries by
disqualifying any juror who refused to swear in advance to leave his
or her conscience outside and enforce the law as the judge explained
it to them.

The king's ministers insisted the colonists were represented by
Members of Parliament who had never set foot on these shores. Today,
of course, our interests are "represented" by one of two millionaire
lawyers -- both members of the incumbent Republicrat Party -- between
whom we were privileged to "choose" last election day, men who for the
most part have lived in mansions and sent their kids to private
schools in the wealthy suburbs of the imperial capital for decades.

Yet the colonists did rebel. It's hard to imagine, today, the faith
and courage of a few hundred frozen musketmen, setting off across the
darkened Delaware, gambling their lives and farms on the chance they
could engage and defeat the greatest land army in the history of the
known world, armed with only two palpable assets: one irreplaceable
man to lead them, and some flimsy newspaper reprints of a parchment
declaring: "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the
Pursuit of Happiness -- That to secure these Rights, Governments are
instituted among men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of
the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive
to these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.
..."

Do we believe that, still?

Recently, President Clinton's then-Drug Czar, Lee Brown, told me the
role of government is to protect people from dangers, such as drugs. I
corrected him, saying, "No, the role of government is to protect our
liberties."

"We'll just have to disagree on that," the president's appointee said.

The War for American Independence began over unregistered untaxed
guns, when British forces attempted to seize arsenals of rifles,
powder, and ball from the hands of ill-organized Patriot militias in
Lexington and Concord. American civilians shot and killed scores of
those government agents as they marched back to Boston. Are those
Minutemen still our heroes? Or do we now consider them "dangerous
terrorists" and "depraved government-haters"?

In Phoenix last week, an air-conditioner repairman and former military
policeman named Chuck Knight was convicted by jurors -- some
tearful -- who said they had no choice under the judge's instructions,
on a single federal conspiracy count of associating with others who
owned automatic rifles on which they had failed to pay the $200
transfer tax. This was after a trial in which defense attorney Ivan
Abrams says he was forbidden to bring up the Second Amendment as a
defense.

In The Federalist No. 29, James Madison sought to assuage the fears of
anti-federalists who worried the proposed new government might someday
take away our freedoms:

"If circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an
army of any magnitude," he wrote, "that army can never be formidable
to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of
citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and the use
of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights and those of their
fellow citizens."

Any such encroachments by government would "provoke plans of
resistance," Mr. Madison continued in The Federalist No. 46, and "an
appeal to a trial of force," made possible by "the advantage of being
armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every
other nation."

Were Arizona's Viper Militia readying plans of resistance, as
recommended by Mr. Madison? Would the Constitution ever have been
ratified at all had Mr. Madison and his fellow federalists warned the
citizens that such non-violent preparations would get their weapons
seized and land them in jail for decades?